In the series of The Great Philosophers of History, we analyze the most fundamental ideas and viewpoints of the lives of the greatest philosophers in human history. In this episode, we will explore the philosophy of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In addition to being a philosopher, Fyodor Dostoevsky is best known as a Russian novelist. His works explore human psychology in the conflicted socio-political environment of 19th-century Russia. His novels had a great impact on psychology, studying how the human mind works, especially in individuals who lose their reason, are nihilists, or become insane or commit murder. He is considered one of the greatest psychological novelists in world literature. Dostoevsky was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1821. His family was very religious, and so was he. He started writing a lot as a child, in addition to being homeschooled until he was sent to a private school when he was 13 years old. Two years later, his mother died of tuberculosis. Dostoevsky's father, an alcoholic with a bad temper, withdrew into seclusion and became even more miserable in temperament. This anger was expressed as abuse towards his servants. While still in school, Dostoevsky learned that his father had been murdered; the cause of death was left open to speculation, although some speculated that his servants had killed him as an act of revenge.

The death of his father, in such mysterious and sinister circumstances, could not help but deeply affect Dostoevsky. His first convulsion coincided with his father's death; this was to be the first sign of his lifelong battle with epilepsy. After completing his studies at the engineering academy at the age of 23, his passion for literature led him to resign from the career he had trained for and dedicate himself to writing. Although he had produced some translations of foreign novels, they had little success, so he decided to write a novel of his own to try to raise funds. He faced great economic difficulties due to his extravagant lifestyle and his serious gambling addiction. Dostoevsky began his career by writing fiction about the poor in difficult situations. In 1843, he published his first novel, Poor Folk, written in the form of letters. It tells the story of an impoverished clerk who is desperately in love with a young woman he can never possess. The novel portrays the life of the poor, their relationship with the wealthy, and poverty in general. The novel was praised by a respected critic, who called it the first social novel and a great socialist work. Unfortunately, his second work, The Double, was less warmly received. His later works did not gain much popularity. This lack of success troubled Dostoevsky. His life and work were characterized by a lack of direction and confusion, publishing stories that

They are mostly experiments in different forms and different subjects. Some years later, he joined a literary discussion group of revolutionaries called the Petrashevsky Circle, focused on overthrowing the existing social order, opposing the Russian feudal system, which kept millions of serfs trapped in a life of servitude without full legal rights. Inevitably, the members were infiltrated by the secret police and eventually arrested, Dostoevsky was among them. He found himself imprisoned and in solitary confinement. For Dostoevsky, it was the true beginning of his inner life, of the enlightenment from which his great works were to come. He was introduced to the theme of punishment that he suffered as well as to crime.
Eight months later, he was sentenced to death. He was taken to be shot by a firing squad in a public square. At the last minute while they loaded and aimed the rifles, a messenger arrived waving a white flag and telling the armed men to stop the execution. Everything had been planned. Every last detail had been arranged in advance in a twisted form of psychological torture.
He was sent to a penitentiary labor camp in Siberia. For four years in extremely harsh conditions, followed by another six years of mandatory military service in exile.
The 1860s were one of the most turbulent decades in Russian history, as well as one with great reforms, with the long-awaited

End of the era of servitude.
After being allowed to return to St. Petersburg about ten years later, he came back a changed man. He wrote and published a memoir of the prison titled Notes from the House of the Dead, in which he described his own experience as well as the lives of a variety of prisoners he encountered in Siberia. And a year later, in 1864, he published Notes from Underground, which is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature. In this work, Dostoevsky attempts to justify the existence of individual freedom as a necessary part of humanity. He presents the story of a bitter and isolated retired official known as the Underground Man. His goal is to make everyone around him as unhappy as he is. However, he is doing something important; he insists on the peculiar fact of the human condition – we want happiness but have a special talent for making ourselves miserable. Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering: that is a fact.
Dostoevsky opposes the popular view that man is a creature of reason and that society can be organized in a way that ensures human happiness. He insists that humans desire freedom more than happiness, but he also sees freedom as a destructive force, as there is no guarantee that humans will use it constructively. The evidence of history suggests that humans seek the destruction of others and themselves.

Suffering is part of the human condition. And ideologies that seek to improve the world always contain a flaw; they will not eradicate suffering but rather change the things that will cause pain. Therefore, life can only be a process of shifting the focus of pain, and there will always be something that agonizes us. Notes from Underground launches an attack on all ideologies of social progress that aim to eliminate suffering, solving a problem and directing our nature to make us unhappy in other ways. Dostoevsky was a unique writer in the sense that he often made the people who represent the antithesis of what he believed to be the strongest, the most intelligent, and the most admirable people in his books, which requires great moral courage. However, some people may be mistaken in thinking that he approves of the actions of these atrocious characters. This astonishing piece of literature was the beginning of his four masterpieces: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Crime and Punishment remains the most widely known Russian novel, as well as one of the greatest works of world literature. It is primarily a fascinating detective novel, but one in which we know from the beginning who committed the heinous crime. It focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Raskolnikov, a impoverished law student in St. Petersburg who cannot afford his studies. It can be seen as a materialist

Raskolnikov, a rationalist, was a rarity at that time and embraced the idea that God was dead. He was convinced that the only reason someone acted morally was out of cowardice and tradition. Dostoevsky wanted to create a character who had all the reasons to commit a murder: philosophically, practically, and ethically. Raskolnikov devises a plan to kill a wicked old woman who is a moneylender and who holds a large sum of money from people in dire financial conditions, after overhearing a conversation in which a student claimed that the world would be better off if she were dead and if the money were in the hands of someone who needed it more. He also believes that he can free himself from poverty and move on to acts of greed for society, the end justifying the means. Raskolnikov rationalized his philosophy of murder by stating: I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of many men, Newton would have had the right... to eliminate a dozen or a hundred men in order to make his discoveries known to all mankind. However, things did not go as planned. After the carefully planned murder, he finds himself confused, paranoid, and disgusted by what he had done. He enters periods of delirium in which he struggles with guilt and horror and has a series of unsettling dreams. In a way, along with the murder, he

Raskolnikov's pride separates him from society. He sees himself as a kind of superior man, someone who is extraordinary and therefore superior to all moral rules that govern the rest of humanity. Thus, he cannot relate to ordinary people, who must live in obedience and do not have the right to break the law. He says, In general, an unusually small number of people are born with a new idea, or are even capable of uttering something new... ... and great geniuses, the culmination of humanity, perhaps only as a result of the passing of many billions of people worldwide. Therefore, he considers himself one of them, and in light of unfortunate worldly circumstances and the advancement of humanity in some way, he overcomes the obstacles of murder and theft.

After the murder, his isolation increases. The novel deeply explores the psychology of Raskolnikov's inner world. Dostoevsky seems to suggest that actual imprisonment and punishment are much better than the stress and anxiety of trying to avoid punishment. In the end, one must confess or go insane. Dostoevsky portrays Raskolnikov as a nihilist, gloomy, and with a profound sense of emptiness for most of the novel. He is a utilitarian who believes that moral decisions should be based on the rule of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, which justifies, in his mind, the murder. From the viewpoint of socialist reforms in Russia

In the 20th century, crime is a protest against the abnormal structure of society and nothing more. In other words, the environment is what has ruined them. Therefore, if society were to be organized normally, then all crimes would instantly disappear, as there would be no reason to protest, and everyone would immediately become fair. However, Dostoevsky harshly criticizes this notion, indicating that: Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it is supposed not to exist. They believe that a social system that has emerged from some mathematical brain will organize all of humanity at once and make it fair and sinless in an instant, faster than any living process! In other words, we cannot be subject to a rigid social system. He states: The living soul demands life; the soul will not obey the rules of mechanics. This, essentially, is one of the most important aspects of Crime and Punishment. Humanity is much more complicated than social engineers like to think.

Another aspect of the book is accepting suffering and being redeemed by it. This was Dostoevsky's message to a world rushing frantically in the opposite direction. Seeking to abolish suffering and find happiness. However, since Dostoevsky's time, the world has faced many problems and found little happiness. The novel reflects social unrest and major changes in Russian society after.

Centuries of servitude. Poverty became a constant hardship, and there was an increase in violence as a result of the difficult economic conditions. Drunkenness, prostitution, disease, and child abandonment came to typify the nature of Russian reality in the 1860s. During this time, nihilism became predominant, advocating for the end of belief in religion and God to be replaced by something new. At this moment, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that God is dead, not as a celebratory statement, but a tragic one. However, he believed that men could do without religion and create new values, rising to the figure of the ubermensch or superman. Thus, man becomes God. Dostoevsky saw this new atheistic movement as incredibly dangerous; he laid the groundwork for the character of Raskolnikov, with his own beliefs of the superman. Nietzsche read and admired Dostoevsky, calling him the only psychologist from whom he had something to learn, and that it was among the strokes of fortune in his life. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had surprisingly similar themes. Both were obsessed with central questions surrounding human existence, especially those related to God. While Dostoevsky is a literary author exploring these themes through nuanced characters and plots, Nietzsche's writing style

It is more aphoristic and poetic. The next important book by Dostoevsky is The Idiot, whose central character is Prince Myshkin, a young man who returns to Russia after spending time in a Swiss sanatorium receiving treatment for epilepsy and idiocy (until the 20th century a real medical term for neurological disorders). Starting with the train journey to St. Petersburg, he is thrown headfirst into the corruption of society. His frankness, innocence, and lack of social experience lead many of the people he encounters to assume he lacks intelligence and call him an idiot, although he is very intelligent, often thinking deeply about human nature and embodying what are supposed to be the best aspects of a human being and a true Christian. Where Crime and Punishment lead Raskolnikov to internal struggle, The Idiot deals with the effect of Prince Myshkin on the cold, money-hungry, and manipulative society he finds himself in. Dostoevsky set out to represent a good soul in a cruel world. It is one of the most personal works in all of his oeuvre, showing the feelings and thoughts of a person before execution, reflecting Dostoevsky's own experience. He wrote: It seemed to my friend that he only had five minutes of life left. He told me that those five minutes were like an eternity, calculated the exact time he needed to say goodbye to

And he decided he could do it in two minutes, then spent another two minutes thinking about himself for the last time, and finally a minute for one last look around. There was a church not far away, its golden roof shining under the bright sun. He remembered staring at the roof with a dreadful intensity and the sun's rays shining from it; he couldn't take his eyes off those rays of light. Those rays seemed to him to be his new nature, and he felt that somehow he had merged with them. The uncertainty and feeling of disgust with this new thing that was about to happen in a minute were terrible. But he said that the most horrible thing for him was the constant thought: What if he didn't have to die? What if he could come back? Oh, what eternity, and all that could be mine. I would turn every minute into an era, wouldn't lose anything, would count each minute separately, and wouldn't waste any. He said that this reflection finally filled him with so much bitterness that he prayed to be shot as quickly as possible. Another similarity between the main character and Dostoevsky is the epileptic episodes. For much of his adult life, he suffered from an unusual and debilitating form of epilepsy. He wrote to his doctor: This epilepsy will eventually take me... My memory has darkened completely. I no longer recognize people... I am afraid of going mad or falling into idiocy. Overall, the novel reflects the meaning of

Life and death and suffering, as well as the beauty of humanity. It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise. However, the book received some criticism due to its uncomfortable structure and chaotic organization. Dostoevsky wrote in a letter: Much of the novel was written hastily, much of it is too diffuse and did not turn out well, but part of it did turn out well. I am not behind the novel, but I am behind the idea. His third masterpiece is The Demons or The Devils. It is an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the ideologies present in 19th century Russia, especially European liberalism, and nihilism in contrast to what was most important to Dostoevsky, Russian Orthodoxy.
The novel is sometimes very funny but slowly becomes progressively tragic and sinister, delving into the depths of human despair, without one escaping from the darkness.
It becomes a large-scale tragedy that studies the question of the social organization of the future society that will replace the current one. The main objective of the novel is to show what a spiritual void can do to human nature and how an unresolved existential crisis of an individual can lead to disaster. The demons can be considered characters as spokespeople for different ideologies that attract.

The Russian mind. Each of the ideologies carries a perspective of God, which can be summarized in four different points:
The first ideology is religious nationalism, which asserts that the goal of all movements of nations is only the search for God. The second is destructive nihilistic socialism that serves as a disguise for opportunism. The third is faith in one's own will to overcome pain and fear and to become God oneself, and the fourth is the seductive yet repelling personality of Satan, with an empty personality associated with the hallucination of Romanticism.
In the end, all perish. The whole law of human existence consists of nothing more than that a man can always bow down before the immeasurably great. In other words, Dostoevsky portrays human existence as a sign of divinity, immeasurable and infinite. People feel emotionally attached not by realism, but by the ideal side of ideologies and the religious note in it.
The work was so powerful that a particular chapter In Tikhon was banned and considered immoral because it was unbearably realistic. Dostoevsky was forced to publish the book without it. A shocking and revealing chapter that summarizes the essence of the novel, which was later included as an appendix. The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky's last novel; he died shortly after its publication. It is a philosophical novel that delves deeply into issues of God, free will, and

Disguised as a simple murder mystery. It addresses the fundamental question of human existence - what is the best way to live life. It presents three brothers: the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational atheist Ivan; and the youngest of all, the novice Alyosha, who all have opposing views on this fundamental question. Their father, Fyodor, is a reckless and wealthy man who pursues women. Dostoevsky didn't really know how the book would evolve when he started writing, a testament to his genius. As a result, the book is not so much about the plot, but rather how these brothers evolve and deal with their struggles based on their different worldviews. Humans are walking contradictions, and Dostoevsky's character development in this book is truly a masterpiece. The characters are more real and human than any other, you will identify with them, sympathize with them, curse them, and celebrate them. It can be a deeply personal experience as you might be attached to one of these characters' worldviews, eventually realizing that you don't like what you see - changing your entire view and direction of the world in life as a result of this experience. A particularly important passage in the book is an imaginary encounter with the most powerful religious leader, the Grand Inquisitor, and Jesus, who has returned to Earth. Here, the rationalist and nihilistic ideology that pervaded Russia is defended by Ivan.

While he was with his brother Alyosha. He proclaims that he rejects the world that God has created because it is built on a foundation of suffering. Christ has reappeared among the people and has been recognized. He walks among them in silence with a sweet smile of infinite compassion. The Grand Inquisitor passes by and orders the guards to seize Jesus. The guards take him prisoner and lock him up. The day passes and night falls. In the midst of the deep darkness, the iron door of the prison suddenly opens, and the old Grand Inquisitor himself enters the prison slowly with a light in hand, stops, and gazes for a long time at Christ's face. He accuses him of imposing on humanity the burden of free will, claiming it is a threat to societal stability. If he were to remain alive, he would disrupt everything and therefore must die again. Throughout the time the Grand Inquisitor has been speaking, Christ has remained rather silent. Suddenly, he approached the old man and kissed him gently; that was his only response. The old man, stunned and moved, tells him never to return here and lets him go. The prisoner left, leaving the old man with that kiss shining in his heart and his idea lingering in his mind, and so he remained still. Dostoevsky portrays the Grand Inquisitor not as a monster, but rather as an admirable figure. He is a guide to the crucial idea.

that humans cannot live in purity, they cannot live up to Christ's message. The statue of the Russian national poet Pushkin was presented in 1880, providing Dostoevsky with the opportunity he had long sought, to speak to his compatriots, warning them of the impending dangers and the ruinous consequences that would surely follow if they followed the Westerners with their fraudulent promises of progress and freedom. He delivered his speech in a columned hall used by the nobility. A truly prophetic figure, speaking with great strength and eloquence, and reaching a tremendous climax when he proclaimed the arrival of a universal brotherhood triggered not by socialism and revolution, but by the full and perfect realization of Christian Enlightenment. He died a year later, in 1881, from complications of his health problems. Everything Dostoevsky had warned of had become a reality in Russia; the church had collapsed, nihilism and atheism had become prevalent, and the ideologies of Marx and Lenin, which made people believe that it was possible to create a perfect society without God, caused millions of deaths. Dostoevsky's works, far from seeming to belong to a bygone era, are becoming increasingly relevant in the dilemmas and distractions that are part of the experience of living in this age. His entire life, he was searching for God and only

It seems he found it, if he ever did, at the end of his days, after going through what he called the hell of doubt. What makes it worth reading his books now is the relentless vision of what destructive forces come into the world when there is a void of spiritual understanding. The freedom to choose between good and evil he saw as the very essence of human existence. All our imperfections are part of the human condition and we should not torment ourselves with the dream that we could be perfect and ideal beings. The mystery of human existence lies not only in staying alive but in finding something to live for.

Greatest Philosophers In History | Fyodor Dostoevsky

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